


I conjure bind and charge thee to heavens unknown

by Mythologiae



Category: BlazBlue, Guilty Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Choking, Consensual But Not Safe Or Sane, Crossover, F/M, Light BDSM, Reality Bending, Self-Indulgent, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Unhealthy Relationships, a lot of bullshit metaphors and imagery, this fic literally made me its bitch for months shut uuuuup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:40:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23374801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythologiae/pseuds/Mythologiae
Summary: the night contains meexalts me, promises meo' to dark foundationsthe tender touch of the serpent's dreamsor: Hazama never considered whether or not he had developed a soul until he ended up on the other side of a cauldron and suddenly it found itself a match.
Relationships: Hazama Honoka/I-No (Guilty Gear)
Kudos: 6





	I conjure bind and charge thee to heavens unknown

**Author's Note:**

> an old prompt that wouldn't let me rest until i finished, even after it made me rewrite it in its entirety halfway through the first draft.

* * *

It skitters beneath his skin, arcing along fasciae and sinking into muscle, traveling like a current all the way down to what feels like his very bones. His wrist burns, the dull throb of the countdown like a pulse. For the years he's spent crawling across this world, carving himself out a nice little foothold while he labors for another door, finding one so suddenly is jarring. It comes upon him with the tugging, with the song, its infectious strain drawing him near. It hunts, it haunts, worming its way into him, burrowing with an unearthly insistence and hums:  
  
_Follow, follow, follow.  
  
_ The petty disobedience of his nature is tempered only by curiosity. The numbers have meaning, one he's gleaned from years upon years, and the trail of breadcrumbs is one he can't resist. His inhumanity preserves him, within that space, the barren entirety of it. Yet even the pressure of it only spurs him on, encourages him further. Deeper. It's an ache he feels down to his core and he thrills under the novelty of it.  
  
Its architecture, such as it is, disorients. Pulses the red of blood and viscera as its energy coils and shapes itself, eternally.  
  
When the white sears his eyes he knows he's close.  
  
Orderly, contained, controlled. The space contorts, worlds within worlds between worlds. It's a pretty piece of orchestration he has to admit, even if pretentious on a level he can't appreciate. It calls to mind the old, nowhere near nostalgia-tinged enough to reminisce over with any fondness. He plucks a piece and lets the resonance echo into the nothing just to see what happens. Silence gets him first, disappointing, but on its heels is a melody, low and thick and heady, pulling at strings long since cut.  
  
He can't resist.  
  
Humming with power, the crystal is a fine piece of work; precise and sturdy, a Chord meant to impact. And beneath it, a whirling cacophony of sound and fury; the living embodiment of a funerary dirge. Immense. Intense. As crimson as the environs that had surely borne her into being, notes interwoven into even the prison keeping her contained. Her own chords resonating even from stasis, inextricably written onto and through existence. Indelible.  
  
The Backyard in a minor key.  
  
Anyone else who understood would run. Anyone with sense would forget what they saw, what they knew, and leave well enough alone. Opening slowly, golden eyes drift down to the halted numbers along the fine line passing as his carpal ligament, amused. No soul could claim to match him; not so much a conceit as a preconception. But perhaps it isn't about mix and match. Perhaps it was simply about filling a void. To say she was a whole universe wasn't too far-fetched after all. Perhaps it was the thought that she'd be _enough_.  
  
Ah, but that almost sounded romantic, didn't it?  
  
He'll have to ask her thoughts on the subject.  
  
Anticipation guides his hands through the composition, the breakdown. Time spins, contracts, breaks down to half-measures, the moments between moments the merely mortal can't comprehend. It's in these gaps he places the notes, distorting and disrupting the Chords until the dissonance is too much for them to bear.  
  
His sleeping beauty spits epithets as the crystal shatters, voice a husky snarl.  
  
For an instant, the slow concerto of her waking fills the air around them, swelling magnificently. The immensity of it leaves him speechless, breathless- until it crashes, like the ill-timed clash of cymbals, down around his ears. Disappointing, disappointed. Aching, angry and vicious, a collection of half-formed symphonies and jumbled scores. She's faltering and unfinished, an incomplete understanding of her own nature likely stunting her potential, but even so every chord that streams from her in unconscious, unwitting shrieks is powerful. The order of magnitude between their scores is unreasonable and he thinks, genuinely thinks, that he should watch his step.  
  
Her touch at his wrist is a brand, compounded by the weight of her stare. When her eyes lock on to his, the pale, pearlescent green of an unfinished mirror, he sees himself reflected in fragments; colorful bits and pieces of what could be, what could have been.  
  
"We need to get the fuck out," she growls, voice underscored with the fraying edges of their current self-contained world and all he can do is stare wordlessly at her.  
  
The vortex opens beneath their feet before he can formulate a response.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Extraordinarily quickly, he discovers how deeply he'd underestimated not only her vindictive fury, but her sheer capacity for violence. In her wake, the bar she half-stumbles, half-drags him into is a masterpiece of her vitriol. Blood washes across the floor, the walls, splattered in graceful arcs and soaking cement and linoleum in deep pools. In the neon flickers of signs advertising brands he can't place, she lifts a bottle to her lips and drains it without a pause to breathe. Accentuated by the thick band around her neck, he watches her throat work as she swallows and wonders if finally, finally, she'll speak something besides snarls of creative expletives in between harsh breaths. Instead, she grabs a second bottle, snaps the neck off with a flick of her thumb so she can down it as well. He stares, eyes hidden behind dark lashes, until she turns sharply, unbidden, to stalk toward him. Tacky with residual blood and bruised from the force of her own strength, her knuckles dig into the sides of his head into the hair just behind his temples. It doesn't hurt (he wishes it did) but he doesn't think it's meant to.  
  
"You're so fucking _loud,_ " she hisses, lip curling at the incredulous tilt of his brows. "Not here," she clarifies, two fingers unfurling from her fist to press to his lips. They drag toward his temple, measured in perfect four-four time, and tap once. "Here." Dropping, they move to tap where his heart is meant to be, bringing a minute furrow to her brow when the fabric gives just a bit too much beneath her fingers. "... and here." Her curiosity is palpable but unlike him, she doesn't allow it to lead her.  
  
Leaning back, another bottle is picked up, inspected, and the pulse of her is a steady pizzicato in the spaces beneath where his ribs should be.   
  
"It's like the unholy offspring of Chopin and freeform jazz."  
  
"Ah... then you must be the aural equivalent of a botched nonlinear fractal. Or a roller derby playlist on meth. Whichever the lady prefers."  
  
Her laughter is genuine, even if he can't fathom the why of it, slow smile writing itself across ruby red lips. It's a thing that's as sudden as it is subtle, the way the sound trails off into a hum, the tune familiar, the normally sweet melody turned dark and surreal. How her voice fills the air in that sultry, encompassing vibrato is beyond him, but it's a nearly tangible thing, the gloom she spreads while humming that ridiculously childish song. Almost too late he jerks back as her fingers curl around his tie, tugging him forward.  
  
"Have you been dreaming of me, my dear?" He whispers as the repetition finally drives the point home, eyes opening millimeter by millimeter to catch hers. He sees the hitch of her breath in the tremble of a plump lower lip and laughs, gently, playfully. He can see the chill it draws down her spine, knows she's more than aware of the danger he presents. It thrills him to know she can't deny that about him, as much as it confuses him that she only draws closer. Watching the colors fluctuate beneath the shadow of her lashes almost makes him miss her response.  
  
(An amalgam, the collective fever dream of a self-destructive species, given away by eyes that reflect _everything_.)  
  
"Seventeen times, I think," she replies airily, thoughtlessly, as if it explains everything. At the sharpening of his pupils, her fingers wind tighter in his tie, words breathed across his lips. "What are dreams but events that become meaningless once they're experienced? If something happens, but you're the only one who remembers, isn't it a dream?"  
  
Of course. It always comes back to time, doesn't it?  
  
Still humming, her mouth brushes his with each languid sway against him, eyes open wide. Gaze locked on hers, curiosity once more wins out, finger hooking into the ring on her collar.  
  
"How do you know?"  
  
"I get out. I always get out. Sometimes it takes longer than others, but it's a foregone conclusion."  
  
"That wasn't enough?"  
  
"I don't get a lot of things to look forward to. Or backward. I had to know."  
  
"And now that your curiosity's sated?"  
  
"Oh honey," a noise of amusement bursts from her lips, playful, delighted, her fingers hooking under his tie, holding him in place, "if I were that easy to satisfy, we wouldn't be here."  
  
Her mouth against his tastes like blood and whiskey; bitter, dark and sultry. He doesn't encourage her closer, but he doesn't need to. Her mouth eases from his unresponsive one as he begins to pull away, a hum deep in her throat, an as-of-yet unanswered question in her pale eyes.  
  
"Huh," is the quiet, puzzled murmur and just like that he's got her— hook, line and sinker.  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Arrogant, self-serving, smug and too well-informed, the man who has her on a leash is little more than a child with fingers stuck too deep in pies he was never meant to reach. He exalts himself for it, despite the mess he's made of things once he's drawn them out. His lines are written slipshod and overcomplicated, a composition meaning little other than the breadth of his estimation of himself. Yet he watches the way she lets it play against hers; not harmony or counterpoint-- little more than unpleasant dissonance. He doesn't know how she can stand it; the longer it goes on the more it wears at her, plucking all the wrong strings and leaving sour notes littered along the whole of her. Yet she persists and a part of him buried so deep he barely notices it nevertheless recoils and sets something ugly bubbling beneath his skin.  
  
When she slips back to him, his chords curl around her, a perfect _intermezzo_ , allowing her to refocus, realign.  
  
Her gratitude is bitten lips and a _glissando_ against his throat, liquid-velvet sensation shifting fluidly along his tendons, curling beneath the low, empty chord reverberating in his chest. He has no heartstrings for her to pluck, but he thinks that if he did, that might be what it feels like. He says as much, once, and she laughs a little, fingertips picking a brief, discordant jaunt across her instrument.  
  
"Got no strings on you, huh?"  
  
The words make him bristle, and he silences her laughter with his hands around her throat. Her cheeks flush, back arching her slender neck into the press of his palms, and he almost falters. Instead he curls his fingers tighter, bearing down until she sways with punch-drunk euphoria beneath his hands. His hands drop away as if the suffusion of rose on her cheeks might drip down and scald, and he feels...  
  
He _feels_.  
  
"You're like a disease, you know," he says later, watching her with all the impassivity of someone stuck watching traffic.  
  
"Insidious and deadly? Seems right."  
  
"Intrusive," he corrects, leaning over her, all menace, all malice, dragging her hands from the strings. "Corrosive. Whatever went wrong with you, it spreads."  
  
"Mmhmm," she murmurs, understanding, and he hates her for it. Her attunement to him is wholly, unpleasantly thorough, and he hardly has to speak before her hands are on him, plucking at him until the notes realign. "I _am_ a virus, technically," she concedes, reminding him of the information he'd given, though not without a detached sort of vitriol, directionless and bitter. "I'm meant to intrude. Invade, overwrite, _assume control_." Her fingers halt, spreading wide against cool, near-gaunt cheeks. "But I don't think I can spread anywhere that doesn't give me an in without a lot of trouble."  
  
He considers her, coldly aloof but curious.  
  
When she leans in this time, he doesn't pull away.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
He isn't sure that the emotion the other woman feels when the truth doesn't fracture her is actually surprise; disappointment is more likely. An airhead she might seem, but he knows she can recognize the threat the other woman poses. I-no can tell too, but rather than dwell, rather than think, she _rages_. It's a beautiful thing to witness, the way she tears through time until she finds a spot where the carnage won't matter one way or another. Bones snap, flesh bruises, bleeds, tears; the sound of her guitar shreds through bodies like paper and nothing survives. Through it all, he observes, and when some of the rage burns down and there's only that simmering, pervasive lust for blood left, he slips along behind her, waltzing her through the graveyard she's left in her wake with a smile. He delights in how it unbalances her, in how it shakes those that remains, especially as the coils of Ouroboros make their presence known.  
  
He leaves her to pick up a body, waltzing it over blood and viscera, and she watches with something unreadable in her eyes.  
  
The remaining soldiers gather their bravery but not their wits, unsettled and infuriated by the insult they perceive. Desecration of their comrades' corpses is, he supposes, something likely to set this sort off. They rush their advance, and he pauses to look up, a body draped over his forearm in an elegant dip and sees only crimson. The snap of her fingers heralds a flash of light, wings spreading behind her and he almost _giggles_ at the imagery. There is something absurd about the little bits, the idiosyncratic touches to her, that contradict themselves within her existence so thoroughly. Hateful, lustful. Wicked, _divine_.  
  
Then the dim light of dusk is illuminated scarlet, the spread of her magic almost unfathomably wide. The advancing soldiers skid to a halt, some try to retreat, only now realizing that he'd never been the real threat. The power chord she strikes is deafening, a riotous omen— like lightning streaking across the sky as the projectiles reach their targets. Nothing remains of them after but a fine mist of blood and chunks and chips of bone, drifting along the battlefield like a fog. Eyes closed, arms limp, guitar dangling from her fingertips, she halts as if frozen.   
  
The wind brushes her cheeks, sticking her hair to the coalescing blood on them, her hand coming up to brush it away.   
  
Turning her eyes back to him, blood drips down her cheek, already slick and red-spattered, the mist dotting every inch of her bared skin slowly in crimson. Eyes lidded and dark, irises little more than a shimmering line around wide, dark pupils slip from the corpse still splayed on his arm to his face, and he drops the body in time to catch her shoulders when she crashes into him.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
"Breathe, my little Beast."  
  
It's easy for her to say, considering she's not the one with the leash around her neck. He thinks he'd like to see it sometime, her limbs wrapped in black and green, the sickly glow of Mind Eater against her fair skin. Focusing on that thought, he uses it to follow her instructions, matching his breaths to the steady pulse of light in his mind's eye. Her voice sighs a _'good_ ' as he relaxes, fingertips traversing the dark hole in his chest, head dipping to drag teeth along the slope of his jaw. Normally frenetic, her energy is focused wholly on him, power humming beneath her skin and his alike. She strums a trail along his clavicle, clawing the refrain suddenly, sharply down, tendons contracting, pulling taut. It's sensation like he hasn't felt before, a pain that permeates down to the last atoms of his being. His eyes slip half-open, drifting unfocused toward her face, witnessing her shiver of delight as the first, restrained sound of exquisite pain leaves his parted lips.  
  
Her eyes are a cataclysm of light and color, each ecstatic flutter of her lashes painting a different shade across her irises.  
  
There's something to be said for her ability to make him react, to make him, to a degree, acquiesce. Beneath her hands, her magic, he finds himself oddly malleable. Whether or not it's simply curiosity is something that doesn't bear thinking about; what use could he have for it to be anything else? Yet he knows when she drags her hands along his limbs, enjoying the way he feels beneath her, that there is more than curiosity in the way she looks at him. Volatile little thing that she is, she still _wants_ with intensity that leaves him puzzled. There is no shortage of the stupid and the willing, were she to want nothing more than sensation, but he knows even as he thinks it that no one else could withstand her like he does. No one else could handle the surge of her body, the pressure of her jaws, the pure, unrepentant violence of her quite like he can.  
  
Because he was made for power, was meant to siphon and enhance, and every inch of his skin she claims only etches her, her power, her song deeper into him.  
  
His fingers trace the line of a clavicle and she stills, watching him with her hands still in place, at the ready to hurt, but his fingers simply cup the back of her neck and she leans into his bared fangs with a laugh. When she takes hold of something in the inky darkness of his chest that might be his heart (metaphorically? Literally? He can't be certain anymore) his teeth sink into her lip and don't let go. Body curling close, the steady motion of her hips destabilizes, tries to take and take and take, but he only has so much to give before she's full, overflowing, mouth ripping away with a cry, hand twisting tight the noose she's made of his makeshift leash. His breath catches, holds, dissipates, and unable to take more he slowly, slowly sinks into a half-aware state where every point of focus is nothing more than _her_ and _pain_ and _pleasure_ , and a steady, welcoming dark-red pulse beneath his eyelids until his breath is suddenly returned to him.  
  
A sliver of gold flashes beneath his lashes as his sight returns, and she's an ivory effigy above him, flushed, satiated and _brilliant_.  
  
Shivers course through him, like arcs of lightning sparking along his limbs until he focuses on her properly, catches the flash of teeth against the smudged and bitten color of her lips that heralds _victory, vindication_ at a thousand decibels despite her silence. Her body, however, persists and he can feel as much as _see_ the _'not yet, not yet, more—!_ ' in every restrained motion, every controlled breath. He tightens his grip on her thighs, enough to bruise, enough to mark, and offers his throat like a sacrifice to a hungry god.  
  
She takes it gladly, descending to devour without remorse.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
"You should kill him," he says in the aftermath and she makes a noise that could be agreement, could be displeasure, but he presses on regardless, undeterred. "Really. You're going to do something stupid otherwise." She gives him that look, part amusement, part derision, that means he's walked himself into an insult that's too easy for her to take advantage of and he sneers in return. "I mean it. You don't owe him a damn thing."  
  
The slide of her body over his is warm and sinuous, and the shadow she casts over him is deep. From within it her eyes glow a faint, silver-green, face slack and pensive. The dip of her head drags her mouth over his, brief but voracious, the line of her shoulders tense. He dips his fingers into the eager-slick heat of her and cocks his head in return, observing.  
  
"I don't," is the concession, legs spreading wide atop his hips, invitation and intent all at once, and she dips down again, setting her teeth to his neck. "That's not the point."  
  
Turning her over is a matter of a single, fluid motion that ends with him pressed against and inside her, hands curled around her wrists, his shadow keeping her eyes glimmering that unnatural shade. Rearranging both her wrists into the grip of a single, long-fingered hand, he strokes the other along her neck, a slow, steady motion he echoes with his whole body.  
  
"Then what the hell is?"  
  
"To step on his moment, obviously." Her thighs are tight against his sides, sweat-slick and soft as silk. "Fucker thinks he's just going to get to play the good martyr after all the bullshit he's pulled. Like he thinks no one else has any right to come collect." Her spine arches, wrists twisting in his grip, lashes lowering over her eyes as she lifts her chin to the ceiling. "I figure I ought to prove him wrong, just once in his miserable, entitled little life. Let him see what it's like to be the one dancing to someone else's tune."  
  
They shouldn't, but the words strike something inside him that narrows his focus to her and her alone. She senses it, he knows she does, can feel his energy shift as easy as she can sense them in herself, and raises her brows.  
  
"Something I said?"  
  
"You have no idea," he hisses, sibilant and vicious, misdirected for a fraction of a second as he drives himself deeper, closer, curving down to spread over her like his shadow.  
  
"Clearly," she replies, but it's curious and slow, laced with desire to ask but knowing he'll only say as much as he wants. "Gonna tell me?"  
  
"Maybe," he murmurs, but they both know he won't, and she accepts it with a sigh, hitching her legs higher and arching her neck against the steady pressure of his hand.  
  
But still she only replies "looking forward to it," and surges up to draw his mouth to hers.  
  
He thinks that maybe one day, once they've gotten what they want from each other, he'll take her on. Give her everything he's got and see if it sticks. Because one day, he's certain they'll be tired of each other— her tenure with That Man proves she's not an easy one to contain, and he certainly has no intention of sticking around once his curiosity's been satisfied. It will be, he believes, a learning experience for whoever comes out on top.  
  
(Except no matter what he believes, he's starting to think he doesn't know himself as well as he thought he did. But what's worse is that he thinks that she just might.)  
  
  



End file.
